Where The Newspaper Stands

June 26, 2007

Homeland in-security

The feds' record on port security is hardly reassuring

We'd better hope that President Bush is right about the protective power of the war in Iraq. "We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" may be a sketchy proposition, but it has a certain upside-down appeal because of this: The nation's ability to "fight them over here" would depend, in large part, on the Department of Homeland Security.

We must hope, fervently, that the department accomplishes much good that remains out of the public eye. But some parts of the work it does in the public eye are unsettling.

Never mind the obvious gaffes, like advising duct tape and plastic sheeting as the first line of household defense against a terrorist attack. Consider, rather, the track record of some of the department's units that would play key roles in any threat at home.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency we saw during the Hurricane Katrina fiasco was incompetent and indifferent. The best indicator of the performance of the old INS, renamed the Citizenship and Immigration Service, is the presence in this country of 12 million people who entered it illegally, with no more sophisticated resources than their feet and their dreams. The Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, may be great at getting grandmothers to shed their shoes at airports, but its ability to detect and screen out weapons has been called into question by tests that easily got forbidden items past inspectors. The Government Accountability Office has chided Homeland Security on a number of fronts: staffing, management, accountability, financial management, employee morale and receptiveness to oversight.

So how confident can we be that the agency can carry off a sophisticated, rapid response to a threat? The latest chink in its credibility comes in the form of an announcement that a critical program to protect the nation's ports is being postponed.

Again.

The task itself is straightforward: Come up with a way to limit access to port facilities to people who have passed a security screening, and deny access to those who have not. Compared to the job of protecting against threats whose targets are unpredictable, that doesn't seem so daunting.

But going on six years after attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon reminded us how vulnerable critical facilities can be, the TSA has put the job off again.

Port facilities are both critical and vulnerable. The vast majority of the nation's imports and exports travel through them, and an attack could cause the economy to shudder. They attract thousands of ships from all over the world, including some troublesome ports of call, and bring to the nation's borders thousands of foreign seamen and millions of closed (and largely uninspected) containers. Some, like the Port of Hampton Roads, lie near military installations and population centers.

While port operators have scrambled to upgrade their security and the Coast Guard is on duty, our ports are still porous. And the TSA can't figure out how to keep people who might be a risk out of them. It's been working for years on a Transportation Worker Identification Credential that would restrict unescorted access to people who are issued cards, based on passing background checks, whether they're longshoremen or truck drivers or port executives. But the system that was supposed to be in place in 2004 has been postponed again and again. Earlier this month, the TSA announced it has been put off.

Again.

Developing a nationwide system is a big and complex job. It will cover 750,000 workers. It requires cards that contain photos and fingerprints, and readers for those cards. But surely the technology is available in a country where you can pay for your groceries with a wave of a debit card or a press of a fingertip.

Now it looks like the new system won't reach this area until 2008 or later. Counting from Sept. 11, 2001, that'll be seven years, maybe longer, to respond to a well-understood threat to a critical part of the nation's infrastructure. If that's the best we can expect, we'd better hope we never have to fight terrorists on our waterfront, or any other homefront. *

About this page

'Pardon our mess' during a changing of the guard

Today's editorial page has a different look. What's going on?

First, Editorial Page Editor Jesse Todd took the buyout offered by the company to reduce payroll in what are challenging economic times for newspapers. We're reducing the number of staff-written editorials as we work out how to regroup the opinion page staff.

Also, the whole newspaper is in the process -- a long, complicated process -- of moving to new publishing software. This involves weeks of training for staff members, who have to be pulled from their usual duties.

So we're going to tighten up the editorial page a bit. Starting today, we'll run a syndicated column across the bottom of this editorial page, reducing the space devoted to staff-written editorials and letters to the editor. The op-ed pages will remain the same, but the net effect will be to restore some space to syndicated columns about national issues or foreign affairs.

We'll probably stay with this layout through the summer. Naturally, we'll strive for balance across the political spectrum as we select the columnists for the bottom of this page. Please let us know how you like the expanded rotation. *